| Manu | Date: Saturday, 30-January-2021, 4:58 PM | Message # 1 |
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| Aliens could be sucking energy from black holes. That may be how we'll find them.
By Tom Metcalfe - Live Science Contributor 5 days ago
Aliens could be sucking power from black holes — and that could be how we'd spot the extraterrestrials, scientists say.
This energy-harvesting technology could leave traces just outside a spinning black hole's event horizon — the boundary beyond which a black hole's gravity becomes too strong for matter and energy to escape. And the process could explain at least some flares of plasma, a white-hot form of charged gas, that scientists have already detected near these massive disruptions in time and space. a new study published Jan. 13 in the journal Physical Review D proposes.
And while it’s only a science-fiction idea at the moment — the nearest black hole to us is thought to be more than 1,000 light-years away, which is too far to be reached in many human lifetimes — if astrophysicists could ever work out a method of tapping these cosmic behemoths, rotating black holes could become a near-limitless source of energy for a technologically advanced civilization.
The co-author of the study, astrophysicist Luca Comisso of Columbia University in New York, said the next step will be to figure out what deliberate extraction energy from a black hole might look like to distant observers.
Doing so would allow Earthlings to potentially detect distant alien civilizations, Comisso told Live Science.
"We have only done the physics in this paper," he said. "But I am now working with a colleague of mine to apply this to reality, to look for civilizations, to try to see what kind of signal you would need to look for."
Read more/full article/source - https://www.livescience.com/aliens-suck-black-hole-energy.html
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